Uncommon Sense - SoundSage

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In Buenos Aires, psychoanalysis has “left the clinic”. Far from being for the elite alone, its core concepts and ideas abound in TV shows, the analyses offered by taxi drivers schooled in Lacan, and in intimate conversations among peers. Here Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas tells us about her brilliant study of what she calls “psychoanalytic listening” in the Argentine capital, where friends confidently say things to each other that often imply “when you say X, I hear Y”. Reflecting how such words act as an affront to elsewhere-dominant notions of selfhood and self-knowledge, Xochitl shows the importance of attending to listening - and describes how, rather like that of the analyst, the social scientist’s role is to “go beyond what’s evident”.

Plus: what IS linguistic anthropology? What does it mean to be “Lacanian”? And what’s the relationship between psychoanalysis and social science?

Guest: Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardiner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

By Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas

Genres of Listening: An Ethnography of Psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires

From the Sociological Review Foundation

Listen to Nicky Falkof on Anxiety, Les Back on Listening, Hannah Proctor on Burnout and Billy Holzberg on Emotion

Further resources:

Argentina: the therapy capital of the world
Roman Jacobson, who wrote on Functions of Language
Mikhail Bakhtin
Ferdinand de Saussure
Franz Boas
The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics
Jacques Lacan
Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard
The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory
Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School

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Frantz Fanon, the radical psychiatrist and anti-colonial philosopher, was not a sociologist but has shaped so much critical sociological thought. Julian Go, Professor of Sociology, joins us to reflect on the life, work and significance of one the twentieth century’s most important - and at times misunderstood - thinkers, who was born a French citizen in Martinique, went on to fight for France in WWII, and then against it in Algeria’s struggle for independence.

Julian tells us about encountering Fanon in gradschool, and the reward of sitting with his work. He talks us through the core ideas of Fanon’s landmark books ‘Black Skin, White Masks’ and ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ and explains how, through Fanon, we can see concepts such as postcolonial and cosmopolitan differently. Reflecting on Fanon’s time as a soldier fighting for France and his work as a psychiatrist in Algeria, Julian tells explains Fanon showed us about the ‘social logics’ of colonialism, and explains why his life and thought deserve to be situated in a wider picture of twentieth century anticolonial struggle - and why we must place his work at the very centre of sociological thought and intellectual history. For, as Julian reminds us, to study colonialism and imperialism is far from “niche”; rather “it is to study one of the dominant socio-political formations of modernity”.

Guest: Julian Go; Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truon; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardiner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

By Julian Go

Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US
Fanon's Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism
Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory
Thinking against empire: Anticolonial thought as social theory

From the Sociological Review Foundation

Listen to Hannah Proctor on Burnout, Angelique Nixon on Desire, Les Back on Listening and Brenda Herbert on Childhood - all engaging with Fanon's ideas.
Listen to Manuela Boatca on Europeans, for a discussion of Martinique as an ‘outermost region' of the European Union

Further resources

Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks
Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth
The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon
Frantz Fanon
WEB Du Bois
Aimé Césaire
Martinique

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What does family life really look like in Contemporary China? What has changed through the generations since the Communist Revolution of 1949? And what persists? Jieyu Liu, Professor of Sociology at SOAS, University of London, joins us to discuss her years of detailed research with people across three generations in rural and urban China. Putting forward her concept of ‘embedded generations’, she argues that family transformation has been less linear than assumed - and calls out dominant Eurocentric accounts of modernization and social change.

Plus: Jieyu celebrates the work of prominent sociologist and anthropologist Fei Xiaotong, and recommends Shen Fu’s memoir ‘Six Records of a Floating Life’ for its insights into Chinese society. An important conversation about love, relationships, family and social change - and the influential concept of ‘individualisation’.

Guest: Jieyu Liu; Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardiner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

By Jieyu Liu

Embedded Generations: Family Life and Social Change in Contemporary China

From the Sociological Review Foundation

Listen to Katherine Twamley on Intimacy
Obligated to Care: Intergenerational Family Relations in Contemporary China
Raising Global Families by Pei-Chia Lan
Generationalism: Understanding the difference between what generations are and what generations do

Further resources

Fei Xiaotong - Obituary
Fei Xiaotong (1939) Peasant Life in China
The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies
Individualisation: Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences
Shen Fu (1809/1877) Six Records of a Floating Life

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Who gets to decide when something is over? How is declaring so an act of power? Professor of Global Health Ethics, Patricia Kingori, joins to discuss these questions and many more raised by the interdisciplinary ‘After the End’ project on which she’s the lead researcher.

From ‘post-natal’ to ‘post-war’, we humans seem enamoured with the idea that complex things can be declared “over”. But - from long Covid to the persistence of supposedly long-eradicated diseases - what happens when we’re faced with lived experience that challenges such a simplification? Patricia reflects on this and more, including: what do we owe research participants, after a project has formally ended? And why, if we want to ensure “temporal justice”, should we consider actually asking “the people who are affected" whether they consider a thing to be “over”.

Plus: Patricia evokes her experience of time on St Kitts, where she grew up, and celebrates the time-bending movie ‘All of Us Strangers’. A boundary-breaking, continent-spanning conversation on health, inequality, conflict and time.

Guest: Patricia Kingori; Host: Rosie Hancock; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardiner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

Episode Resources

By Patricia Kingori and colleagues at the ‘After the End’ project

Being the index-case
The End and What Comes After
Indigenous Time

From the Sociological Review Foundation

Good vibrations: Why sociologists make ideal podcasters
Listen to Ilana Gershon on Breakups

Further resources

Sand Talk and Right Story, Wrong Story
Feminist, Queer, Crip
What the land can teach us
Grenfell Tower fire and key findings of the Grenfell Inquiry’s final report
On the standardisation of time
Debora Deniz
Patricia Daley
Against Time
In a Queer Time and Place
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
All of Us Strangers
Dora Vargha and her Polio Across the Iron Curtain

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Note: this episode was recorded in late 2025, prior to the extremely violent suppression of *protests in Iran, and prior to the strikes by the US and Israel that began in late February 2026***

“Being seen” has become a meme, pointing to the satisfaction felt at one’s true self being understood by another. But can we think more critically? Self-described “accidental” Professor of anthropology and ex-taxi driver Shahram Khosravi joins Uncommon Sense to discuss visibility, power, knowledge and the violence of unseeing.

Shahram describes how growing up in Iran’s Bakhtiari culture shaped his own way of seeing and taught him, early on, how some forms of knowing get legitimised while others are dismissed - including in academia, where asking one question obscures the possibility of another. Here, he calls out the topsy turvy optics by which certain people - delivery workers, taxi drivers - go “actively unseen”, while others are loaded with value, visibility and esteem. Plus, he calls out those who ask “where are you from?” of the migrantised person. This “question”, he suggests, is often really a statement of non-recognition.

An urgent conversation, with reflection on Édouard Glissant, George Orwell and Hannah Arendt. It is imperative, Shahram shows, that in what - via Arendt - he identifies as our present “dark times”, we challenge active “unseeing” and speak “clearly…with courage”.

Guest: Shahram Khosravi; Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardiner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

By Shahram Khosravi

How to Do Migration Studies in Dark Times
"Bordered Imagination" in ‘Infrastructural Love: Caring for Our Architectural Support Systems’ (2022) eds: S. Karami, Adr. Carbonell, H. Frichot, H. Frykholm
Doing migration studies with an accent
“The Archive of Stolen Breaths” in 'Breathe – Critical Research into the Inequalities of Life' (2023)
The Holes
'Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran' (2017), University of Pennsylvania Press
'Young and Defiant in Tehran' (2008), University of Pennsylvania Press
De Verbranders podcast, Episode 30: “Outside the Law”

From the Sociological Review Foundation

Listen to Rhoda Reddock on Margins, Angelique Nixon on Desire, Nandita Sharma on Natives
Why Stigma?

Further resources

Miranda Fricker "Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing" (2007)
Judith Butler "Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?" (2016)
Hannah Arendt "Men in Dark Times" (1968)
"For Opacity" in Édouard Glissant’s ‘Poetics of Relation’, transl. Betsy Wing (1997/1990)

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Why do we keep gifts that we don’t want, or can’t currently use? What role do these play in our relationships with others, with time, and perhaps even our future selves? Sophie Woodward discusses the richly creative research project that took her into strangers’ homes, drawers and cupboards, and led her to consider the gifts that lie “dormant” in our homes. Such items might appear “meaningless” or inactive, Sophie shows, but are far from dead or unimportant: “stuff” matters.

Via examples of gifts ranging from inconveniently big plastic toys to alcohol repeatedly gifted by relatives, Sophie explains how, beyond theories of gifts from thinkers like Marcel Mauss on the function of exchange, or Theodor Adorno on the perfect gift, it’s worth a deeper focus on the recipient – people, she observes, have an obligation not just to receive gifts but also to keep them, at least for a certain amount of time.

Plus, we ask: is it ok for recipients to pre-empt and refuse gifts before they’re given, or is gifting the prerogative of the giver? What can we do to reduce material overwhelm? We also celebrate Jane Bennett, who considers the powers of things, beyond the meanings we attribute to them.

A thoughtful and exploratory conversation, crucial in a time of climate emergency, waste, and cost-of-living crises.

Guest: Sophie Woodward; Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

By Sophie Woodward

Dormant Gifts: Animating the Imagined and Narrated Pasts and Futures of Gifts (2025)
Live methods and live things: Cultivating attentiveness to dormant things to develop a vital sociology of the everyday (2025)
Clutter in domestic spaces: Material vibrancy, and competing moralities (2021)
Object interviews, material imaginings and ‘unsettling’ methods: interdisciplinary approaches to understanding materials and material culture (2015)
Sophie’s profile at The University of Manchester and the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives

From the Sociological Review Foundation

New Materialism – Nick J. Fox (2020)
Shrinking domesticity – Mel Nowicki, Tim White, Ella Harris (2022)
Discover our lesson plans for use in the classroom!

Further resources

“The Gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies” – Marcel Mauss
The Opposite of Forgetfulness: Adorno on Gift-Giving – from Stuart Jeffries’ “Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School”
“Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things” – Jane Bennett

Read more about Jane Bennett.

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“What is the effect of receiving something from someone who is not your biological kin?” Anthropologist Delwar Hussain introduces his new project on Queer Inheritance, born when a friend welcomed Delwar and his partner to enjoy items belonging to her late uncle – a man they had never met. This led Delwar to wonder: how are queer people today preparing for their deaths? How, with this in mind, can we think of “inheritance”? And what does the “good death”, of which inheritance is a key part, mean to queer people?

While the word “inheritance” often leads us to thoughts of taxation and legislation, class and inequality, finance and family feuds, this episode heads in a different direction. Reflecting on both physical items, but also those things that remain intangible and untaxable – wisdom, life stories, mentorship, communion – this conversation unites two classic areas of anthropological thought: kinship and the gift. Inheritance, Delwar reminds us – particularly at the peak of the HIV/AIDS crisis, for example, and when homosexuality was illegal in countries like the UK – can be a radical and communicative act. At other times, it reproduces dominant norms, among them heteronormativity and the privileging of biological kin. And then there’s disinheritance, too…

A fascinating and exploratory conversation about family, choice, meaning and death. Plus: the enduring popularity of Kath Weston’s “Families We Choose”.

Guest: Delwar Hussain; Hosts: George Kalivis, Alexis Hieu Truong; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

By Delwar Hussain

‘Just who do I leave my worldly possessions to, darling?’: A Study of Queer Inheritance – research project funded by a Wellcome Accelerator Award
Boundaries Undermined: The Ruins of Progress on the Bangladesh/India Border (2013)
Delwar’s profile at The University of Edinburgh

From the Sociological Review Foundation

Uncommon Sense episodes: Love & Reproduction, with Alva Gotby (2025); Performance, with Kareem Khubchandani (2023); Desire, with Angelique Nixon (2025)
Discover our lesson plans for use in the classroom!

Further resources

“Families We Choose” – Kath Weston
“The Gift” – Marcel Mauss
“Forgetting Family” – Jack Halberstam, in “A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies”
“How to Survive a Plague” – David France
“Abolish the Family” – Sophie Lewis
“Anthropology and Inheritance” – Current Anthropology special issue featuring the pieces by João Biehl, Adam T. Smith and Tim Ingold, mentioned by Delwar

Read more about the work of Judith Butler and Resto Cruz.

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How have maternal - and grandmaternal - ways of knowing been sidelined and undervalued? What role has sociology’s focus on its ‘founding fathers’ played? And what’s the cost, in South Africa and beyond? Babalwa Magoqwana, Director of the Centre for Women and Gender Studies at Nelson Mandela University, joins us from Gqeberha.

In this fascinating conversation on knowledge and value, gender and care, Babalwa celebrates her grandmother - “a learning space, a space of imagination” - who provided her with “ways of knowing” that remain sidelined in academia. By foregrounding such maternal and grandmaternal figures, Babalwa argues, not only might we reduce the dissonance felt by students whose experience jars with that shown to them by classic sociological theory (of the “nuclear family”, for example); we also quickly see how the production of what we value as “knowledge” has been a colonial imposition - including rigid gender binaries, or notions of seniority rooted solely in chronology - that did not originate in Africa itself. Motherhood, says Babalwa, has been reduced to the identity of a single female person. We must de-gender it and recognise that all of us need to care.

Plus: Babalwa celebrates the work of Ifi Amadiume, author of ‘Male Daughters, Female Husbands’, and Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, author of ‘The Invention of Women’. She also reflects on the unrecognised labour of Black women in the neoliberal university. And we ask: can we speak of “African Sociology” in general? Babalwa explains why we may.

Guest: Babalwa Magoqwana; Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

By Babalwa Magoqwana

Inyathi Ibuzwa Kwabaphambili: Theorising South African Women's Intellectual Legacies (2024, with S. Magadla and A. Masola)
On maternal legacies of knowledge, ukwambathisa, and rethinking of the sociology of Eastern Cape, South Africa (2023, with P. Maseko)
Thirty years of Male Daughters, Female Husbands (2021, with S. Magadla and N. Motsemme)
Reconnecting African Sociology to the Mother (2020, with J. Adesina)
“Forced to Care” at the Neoliberal University (2019, with Q. Maqabuka and M. Tshoaedi)

From the Sociological Review Foundation

Uncommon Sense episodes: Margins, with Rhoda Reddock (2024); Natives, with Nandita Sharma (2022); Love & Reproduction, with Alva Gotby (2025)
Discover our lesson plans for use in the classroom!

Further resources

“I Write What I Like” – Steve Biko
“Three Mothers” – Anna Malaika Tubbs
“Male Daughters, Female Husbands” – Ifi Amadiume
“The Invention of Women” and “What Gender is Motherhood?” – Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí
“Forced to Care” – Evelyn Nakano Glenn
“Scholars in the Marketplace” – Mahmoud Mamdani
“Eating from One Pot” – Sarah Mosoetsa

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What’s behind the reductive pursuit of “paradise” in travel to the Caribbean? How does tourism continue the legacy of colonialism? And how is this being resisted? We’re joined by Angelique Nixon, a scholar and activist at The University of the West Indies at St. Augustine, whose book “Resisting Paradise” examined how tourism shapes Caribbean life and identity, including via deep-rooted notions of “paradise” grounded in colonialism and exploitation. Angelique describes how the Caribbean, a region of such diverse islands, has been constructed a site for the fulfilment of particular desires, while other forms of desire have been suppressed in mainstream narratives. Angelique joins us to discuss this, as well as her new project, “Submerged Freedom”.

Plus: Angelique reflects on writing as a “black sexual intellectual”, and describes how Franz Fanon led her to reflect on tourism as “the stagnation of decolonisation” – as reproducing and reinforcing existing racialised inequalities. Also, we celebrate thinkers including the sociologist Kamala Kempadoo, authors Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid and Erna Brodber. And we profile the radical Caribbean philosopher Sylvia Wynter, whose work challenged the assumptions of western liberal humanism and highlighted the importance of working on ourselves as part of decolonial work.

Guest: Angelique Nixon; Host: Rosie Hancock; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

By Angelique Nixon

Resisting Paradise (2015)
On Being a Black Sexual Intellectual (2019)
Angelique’s academic profile, including information on her latest project, “Submerged Freedom”
CAISO – feminist non-profit civil society organisation committed to ensuring wholeness, justice and inclusion for Trinidad and Tobago’s LGBTQI+ communities

From the Sociological Review Foundation

Uncommon Sense episodes on: Europeans, with Manuela Boatcă (2023) and Margins, with Rhoda Reddock (2024)
Len Garrison: Archives and Self-Esteem – audio essay by Hannah Ishmael (2025)

Further resources

“Island Futures” – Mimi Shiller
“An Eye for the Tropics” – Krista Thompson
“Sexing the Caribbean” – Kamala Kempadoo
“Paradise and Plantation” – Ian Strachan
“The Repeating Island” – Antonio Benítez-Rojo
“The Wretched of the Earth” – Franz Fanon
“After The Dance” – Edwidge Danticat
“A Small Place” – Jamaica Kincaid
Sylvia Wynter: Beyond Man – short introductory video by Al Jazeera

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A bonus offering for Uncommon Sense listeners! We’re sharing our mini-series, Sideways Sociology: UK Anti-Racism, in which three experts introduce us to three key figures in the story of UK anti-racism, illuminating how they show us what that term really means – and what it takes – but also how their work and ideas speak to sociology.

How can archives fight racism? How can progressive educational resources tackle the harm of discrimination? Why have millennia of British history so often been presented through a reductive and harmful white gaze? Hannah Ishmael – lecturer in Digital Culture and Race at King’s College London – introduces Len Garrison, an activist, archivist and determined educationalist who worked to improve education, particularly for minoritised populations – and to disprove and displace assumptions about the history of Black presence in the UK. Garrison was central in creating ACER – the African Caribbean Education Resource project – and became a leading founder of BCA – the Black Cultural Archives – in Brixton, where, with others, he enacted his conviction that archives have the power to change the reality and representation of people’s lives.

An essay on the meaning and value of archives, and the nature and potential of anti-racist education. With reflection also on Bernard Coard and Stuart Hall, and the importance of attending to what people do as well as what they write.

Episode Readings and Resources: https://doi.org/10.51428/tsr.lscb4869

Episode Credits

Author: Hannah Ishmael
Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound: Emma Houlton
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Kieran Cairns-Lowe

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What did Black radical politics look like in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s? What was its relation to the Black women’s movement, which highlighted the multiple oppressions faced by Black women? How, in studying such movements, can we celebrate brilliant activists, without erasing the importance of movements and collectives? In this essay, A.S. Francis – author of “Gerlin Bean: Mother of the Movement” – introduces Gerlin Bean, the Jamaican-born activist who came to the UK as a student nurse and became central to Black British Feminist Socialism. They describe Bean, who passed away in early 2025, as a radical listener and mediator who applied to her entire way of living an acute awareness of how race and gender intersect to create particular types of disadvantage – and spoke to those she helped, on the ground, with a skillset that sociologists and others could learn a lot from.

Episode Readings and Resources: https://doi.org/10.51428/tsr.jgfc6963

Episode Credits

Author: A.S. Francis
Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound: Emma Houlton
Music: Joe Gardiner
Artwork: Kieran Cairns-Lowe

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What does tech have to do with anti-racism? Why do we dismiss complex economics at our peril? And how do global struggles for justice connect to local ones? Here, John Narayan – Chair of the Council of the Institute of Race Relations, and a lecturer in European and International Studies at King’s College London – introduces us to Ambalavaner Sivandanan, or “Siva”, a giant of anti-racism who showed us how to truly understand discrimination, and how we can best confront it, together – not just at the interpersonal level or that of language alone, but through communities of resistance, with an eye focussed on capitalism, colonialism and technology. Here, John celebrates and unpacks the ideas within Siva’s 1989 essay ‘New Circuits of Imperialism’, which saw him address racism, capitalism and tech at a global scale, and relate this back to state racism at the national level.

Siva, John says, shows us the scope for a truly anti-racist sociology, teaching us that the struggles of “Indian farmers for land rights, those of indigenous Amazonians, and those of Grenfell Tower fire survivors” are ultimately connected – united by “a story of people harmed and marginalised by the market state; and confronting it.”

Episode Readings and Resources: https://doi.org/10.51428/tsr.lhcx9119

Episode Credits

Author: John Narayan
Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound: Emma Houlton
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Kieran Cairns-Lowe

Production Note: This episode was recorded in 2024.

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Made tea for your partner today? Helped a vulnerable neighbour? You may have been performing what Alva Gotby calls “emotional reproduction” – the caring and emotional work we do to create good feeling amid life under capitalism, but that also plays a part inreproducing that very system and its norms. While it may feel like love, such work can be exhausting, unjustly organised and heavily gendered.

Inspired by Wages for Housework and sharing common ground with thinkers such as Sophie Lewis, Alva reflects on the often invisible, isolating and unevenly distributed emotional work that we perform to help each other withstand capitalism – and that keeps us attached to the status quo. It’s a discussion that raises crucial questions. We ask: is anything left of love after such an analysis? What does this mean for altruism? And how can we think critically about care while still valuing it? It’s not that we must stop caring, Alva explains; instead, we need wholesale reform of the social relations within which we care. Seeking “equality” within the norms of romantic coupledom and the insular nuclear family will only get us so far.

Plus: what about the mobilisation of another emotion – hate – in the so-called manosphere? And is the “trad wife” a response, of sorts, to the same crisis that Alva identifies? A provocative conversation, reflecting on love, private life, emotion, family, care and capitalism.

Guest: Alva Gotby; Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

By Alva Gotby

They Call It Love: The Politics of Emotional Life (Verso, 2023)
Feeling at Home: Transforming the Politics of Housing (Verso, 2025)

From the Sociological Review Foundation

Uncommon Sense episodes on: Care, with Bev Skeggs; Emotion, with Billy Holzberg; Burnout, with Hannah Proctor; Joy, with Akwugo Emejulu
Book review of “They Call it Love” – Patrycja Sosnowska-Buxton (2023)
Contributions, conjunctures and care: Revisiting Formations of Class and Gender – journal article by Helen Wood and Jo Littler (2025)
Migrants' Regular Army of Labour – journal article by Sara Farris (2015)

Further resources

“The Managed Heart” – Arlie Hochschild
“Formations of Class and Gender” – Bev Skeggs
“The Feminine Mystique” – Betty Friedan
“The Promise of Happiness” – Sara Ahmed
“Abolish the Family” – Sophie Lewis
“Radical Intimacy” – Sophie K Rosa
“The Mental Load: A Feminist Comic” – Emma
“Wages Against Housework” – Sylvia Federici
“I cannot hold appropriate space for these bizarre self-care templates” – Shon Faye (on DAZED)
“The Mothers Who Fought To Radically Reimagine Welfare” – Gene Demby (on NRP)
“I'm a professional cuddler - let me tell you why a hug feels so good” – Danny Fullbrook (on BBC News)

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How do stereotypes of “the child” contribute to injustice? Why must we decolonise childhood? What can it mean to work with love, rather than just study it? And how can we think about children’s agency? Sociologist and counsellor Brenda Herbert, the Sociological Review Fellow for 2024-25, reflects on her in-depth research getting to know children who had experienced domestic abuse and social work intervention in London. Applying a “live methods” approach – working with photography, play, and simply hanging out – she looked beyond the typical trauma and social work gaze to create knowledge with them about what mattered to them in their everyday lives.

Inspired by Erica Burman’s “Child as Method” and by Franz Fanon, Brenda reflects on how powerful notions of “the child” can serve to prop up the status quo – from the treatment of refugees, to how children’s views are handled in family courts. Meanwhile, children who don’t fit our expectations of what a child should be risk being treated differently and pathologised.

A heartfelt and rallying conversation, also describing the distinct joys and the challenges of doing research with children. Reflecting on social work, agency, power, and decolonial and black feminist thought, including Brenda’s “first academic love”: bell hooks.

Guest: Brenda Herbert; Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

By Brenda Herbert

The Everyday Lives of Children Who Have Experienced Domestic Abuse: Looking Beyond the Trauma Lens – forthcoming
What’s love got to do with it? Live methods and researching with children who have experienced domestic abuse and social work intervention – 2025
Cupboard love: Is tidiness essential for good parenting? – 2023

From the Sociological Review Foundation

Palestine: A Sociological Issue
Live Methods
Joy, with Akwugo Emejulu
The Sociological Review Fellowship 2024-25: meet our winner

Further resources

“The Unhappy Divorce of Sociology and Psychoanalysis” – eds. Lynn Chancer, John Andrews
Hortense Spillers in conversation with Gail Lewis (ICA, London, 2018)
“Child as Method” – Erica Burman
“All About Love” – bell hooks
“The Selected Works of Audre Lorde” – ed. Roxane Gay
“The Creative Spirit and Children’s Literature” – June Jordan, in “Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines” – eds. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, Mai'a Williams

Read more about Hortense Spillers, Gail Lewis and Franz Fanon. Plus: the concept of epistemic injustice.

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How is the notion of “free speech” abused and misunderstood? What’s wrong with “debate me” culture – and with the value placed on appearing to be “controversial”? And what happens when people who are actually pretty powerful claim they “can’t say anything anymore”? Sociologist Aaron Winter, an expert on racism and the far right, joins Uncommon Sense to discuss all this and more.

Showing what sociology has to offer to discussions of “freedom” often found in politics, Aaron describes how “free speech” has been invoked through the decades in North America and Europe, including in the victimisation narratives found in far-right discourse today. Plus, we reflect on the importance of no-platforming, and the need for critical thought when we hear that certain ideas are simply the “voice of the people”.

Featuring discussion of Aaron’s work with Aurelien Mondon on “Reactionary Democracy”. Also: celebration of influential American sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, author of “Racism without Racists”, and the UK band The Specials.

Guest: Aaron Winter; Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

By Aaron Winter

Reactionary Democracy: How Racism and the Populist Far Right Became Mainstream – co-authored with Aurelien Mondon, 2020
Reading Mein Kampf, Misreading Education: The reactionary backlash goes back to school – co-authored with Aurelien Mondon, 2017
Online Hate: From the Far-Right to the ‘Alt-Right’ and from the Margins to the Mainstream – 2019
Conflating antisemitism and anti-zionism emboldens the far right – 2023

From the Sociological Review Foundation

The Cacophony of Critique – Tom Boland
Voice, with Claire Alexander, Dan McCulloch and Belinda Scarlett
Palestine: A Sociological Issue

Further resources

"On Liberty" – John Stuart Mill
"White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-civil Rights Era" – Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
"Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America" – Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
The Specials

Read more about Jose Medina, Miranda Fricker and the concept of epistemic injustice, as well as Michèle Diotte at The University of Ottawa.

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The word “revolution” conjures powerful imagery. But what does it mean today? Do revolutions neatly promote the will of the people, forging radical transformation? Or is it more complicated? Sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko joins us from Freie Universität Berlin to explain his take on “deficient revolutions” as he reflects on the 2014 Euromaidan uprising and recent events in Ukraine – where, he argues, conflict with roots in class has become polarised along “ethnic” lines, with devastating consequences.

Ukraine, he shows, is not an anomalous case on the periphery of Europe and the former USSR. Rather, its story is instructive for the study ofglobal processes, including the “crisis of hegemony” – one he describes in terms of the “shellness” of politics, and which is in fact often compounded by contemporary revolutions. “People want their say”, Volodymyr explains. “They can overthrow the governments. But they cannot bring about the change that would represent their interests”.

An urgent discussion about decolonisation and discourse, progress, popular mobilisation and imagining alternative futures. With reflection on Soviet-era sci-fi authors, the Strugatsky brothers – and on sociologists’ duty to highlight complex, messy realities.

Guest: Volodymyr Ishchenko; Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

By Volodymyr Ishchenko

Towards The Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War
Ukrainian Voices?
Class or regional cleavage? The Russian invasion and Ukraine’s ‘East/West’ divide
Insufficiently diverse: The problem of nonviolent leverage and radicalization of Ukraine’s Maidan uprising, 2013–2014
Why is Ukraine struggling to mobilise its citizens to fight?

From the Sociological Review Foundation

Community, with Kirsteen Paton
Security, with Daria Krivonos
Good warning, Vietnam? Comparing the Russian opposition to Putin with the greatest anti-war movement in the US – Arseniy Kumankov

Further resources

The Snail On The Slope – novel by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, also reviewed in the TLS by Muireann Maguire
Understanding Ukraine’s Euromaidan Protests – Open Society Foundations
“Ethnic Conflict: A Global Perspective” – Stefan Wolff

Read more about Antonio Gramsci, William H. Sewell and Dylan John Riley.

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Hi everyone!

The next episode of Uncommon Sense is landing here soon, but for now, we want to tell you about our brand new podcast, Sideways Sociology: UK Anti-Racism, a mini-series of audio essays on the work and lasting sociological significance of three important and inspirational figures in the story of UK anti-racism: Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Gerlin Bean and Len Garrison.

Listen to our trailer to learn more!

Be sure to FOLLOW the podcast on your preferred platform to catch all episodes: https://sideways-sociology.buzzsprout.com/2498143/follow

Episodes will also be made available directly on our website: https://thesociologicalreview.org/podcasts/sideways-sociology-uk-anti-racism/

Out on May 30th!

Thanks for listening.

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How do we typically see fat, and how can thinking differently about it have emancipatory outcomes? Fady Shanouda of Carleton University’s Feminist Institute of Social Transformation introduces Fat Studies and their inextricable link to activism. Alert to the connection between living and other things, Fady unpacks his feminist new materialist approach, and explains what it means to say “I’m not fat in my house”, describing how our surroundings can liberate us or show bias. He also considers the harm caused by misconceptions of fat as simply “surplus”, “inanimate” or even “dead” material. How does such valuing get mapped onto whole bodies and lives? And what happens if, instead, we recognise fat as essential, pushing back against the idea that having a lower amount of body fat means somehow a more valuable life?

Plus: how has fat come to be seen as a matter for psychiatry? And what are the manifestations of the “fat tax” in a world where things are made with certain bodies in mind and costs imposed on others?

Featuring discussion on autoethnography in North America. Plus: celebration of TV drama “Shrill” and the gripping reality TV survival series “Alone”.

Guest: Fady Shanouda; Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

By Fady Shanouda

Fat Animacy (forthcoming book chapter)
Fat and Mad Bodies: Under, Out of, and Beyond Control (chapter in Fat Studies in Canada)
Disability Saves the World (podcast)

From the Sociological Review Foundation

Sugar Rush by Karen Throsby – Lucy Aphramor
Fat Activist Podcasts
Just my size? Our bodies, our waistbands, our triggered selves – Nina Sökefeld

Further resources

“Fat Studies” – an Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society
“Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect” – Mel Y. Chen
“The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain” – Margaret Price
“Narrating the Closet: An Autoethnography of Same-Sex Attraction” – Tony E. Adams
The “Pool” episode of the TV series “Shrill”
The reality TV survival show “Alone”

Further reading

“Coal is Our Life” – N. Dennis, F. Henriques, C. Slaughter
“Family and Kinship in East London” – M. Young, P. Willmott
“St Ann's” – K. Coates, R. Silburn
“Neither ‘Deepest, Darkest Peckham’ nor ‘Run-of-the-Mill’ East Dulwich: The Middle Classes and their ‘Others’ in an Inner-London Neighbourhood” – E. Jackson, M. Benson
“‘I Probably Would Never Move, but Ideally Like I’d Love to Move This Week’: Class and Residential Experience, Beyond Elective Belonging” – B. Jeffery
“Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism” – A. Sivanandan
“A Global Sense of Place” – D. Massey
“New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s” – eds. S. Hall, M. Jacques
“All That Melts into Air is Solid: The Hokum of New Times” – A. Sivanandan

Support Uncommon Sense

Uncommon Sense is a project of the Sociological Review Foundation, a charity whose mission is to promote sociological thinking to audiences beyond academia.

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Think you know “coffee culture”? Anthropologist Grazia Ting Deng discusses her research into the “paradox of Chinese Espresso” – or why and how coffee bars in Italy, seen as such distinctively “Italian” spaces, became increasingly managed by Chinese baristas since 2008. Grazia tells Rosie and guest host Amit Singh – who highlights the overlap with his own co-authored research into the UK’s desi pubs – about her ethnographic study and how she even trained as a barista to better grasp her subject. Painting a vivid picture of how management by Chinese baristas grew due to economic, social and cultural factors in Bologna, Italy, she describes how and why these baristas have typically preserved rather than altered the culture in place. The coffee bar, she shows, is an everyday site of friction and adaptation where diverse groups come together and interact to construct a convivial space. Crucially, Grazia argues, conviviality is not some lofty goal – as is often thought to be the case – rather, it’s a lived reality, characterised by contingency and compromise.

Guest: Grazia Ting Deng
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Amit Singh
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

By Grazia Ting Deng

Chinese Espresso
Hopefully a Good Life
I Cinesi among Others: The Contested Racial Perceptions among Chinese Migrants in Italy

Discussed by Rosie, Amit and Grazia

“Heaven’s Kitchen” – Courtney Bender
“In Search of Respect” – Philippe Bourgois
“Challenging Codes” – Alberto Melucci
“New Ethnicities and Urban Culture” – Les Back
“Coffee and Cigarettes” – film, dir. Jim Jarmusch
“Shun Li and the Poet” – film, dir. Andrea Segre

From The Sociological Review

Social spaces and non-places: The community role of the traditional British pub – Reid Allen
Convivial narratives as agency: Middle-class Muslims evading racialisation in Copenhagen – Amani Hassani
Valuing the bowling alley: Contestations over the preservation of spaces of everyday urban multiculture in London – Emma Jackson

Further reading

“The Great Good Place” – Ray Oldenburg
A pub for England: Race and class in the time of the nation – Amit Singh, Sivamohan Valluvan, James Kneale
“After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?” – Paul Gilroy
“Stories from a migrant city” – Ben Rogaly
“Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection” – Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
“The Invention of Tradition” – eds. Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger
“Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” – Clifford Geertz

Read more about the work of Mary Louise Pratt.

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What does it mean to make things? Why are some people valorised as “makers”, while others are rendered invisible? And what duty do sociologists have as makers of knowledge and narratives? The “sewing cycling sociologist” Kat Jungnickel joins Uncommon Sense to discuss all this and more; including her years of research celebrating historic female cyclists as radical inventors, makers and hackers, responding to barriers to their freedom of movement and raising crucial questions about power and space.

Rosie (no stranger to DIY) and Alexis (a lifelong fan of taking things apart) ask Kat: what exactly is “Science and Technology Studies” (STS) and what’s the idea of the “black box” all about? How are the factory workers who make “our” clothes regarded in academia and beyond? Aren’t we all “makers” now, feeding our “smart” devices? And what can we learn from “Do It Together” (DIT) communities, like those Kat studied for her doctoral work in Australia, where she met people building their own wi-fi networks? Are they performing radical resistance to capitalism, or simply dealing with its downsides?

Plus: Kat celebrates the work of thinkers who inspire her, including Saidiya Hartman. Hartman’s “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments”, Kat suggests, invites us to interrogate and remake established narratives, and to make space for those previously dismissed and denied a voice. Also discussed: John Urry, John Law, Angela McRobbie, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour and more.

Production Note: This episode was recorded before Kat Jungnickel's home institution of Goldsmiths, University of London announced organisational restructuring, which includes plans to make more than 50% of academic staff in the Department of Sociology redundant.

Guest: Kat Jungnickel
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense

Episode Resources

By Kat Jungnickel

Bikes and Bloomers and the project’s open-source sewing patterns
Politics of Patents
Making Things to make Sense of Things
Making WiFi
Kat’s website

From The Sociological Review

Words failed us: Repairing sociology’s haunted past means finding new language to write about the social world – Gala Rexer
“The Promises of Practice” – Christopher Gad, Casper Bruun Jensen
“Fixing the future? How architects make time in buildings for later life care” – Siân M. Beynon-Jones, et al.

Further reading

“Science in Action” – Bruno Latour
“Staying with the Trouble” – Donna Haraway
“Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments” – Saidiya Hartman
“A Social History of American Technology” (2nd edition) – Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Matthew H. Hersch

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Burnout has become a byword for workplace exhaustion, but does it have a deeper history? Hannah Proctor joins us to explain how the notion emerged in the USA’s 1960s countercultural free clinics movement, at first relating to the emotional defeat of idealistic activists but came to be seen as simply the result of working too hard. It’s a story that tracks the trajectory of capitalism itself – as Hannah shows referencing thinkers from Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello to filmmaker Adam Curtis.

Rosie and Alexis ask Hannah: are there gendered, classed and racialised aspects to how burnout gets discussed? How do structural conditions prevent us from caring for caregivers? And how do the statements of those in power undermine or validate the causes we care about, and thus compound our feelings of defeat and exhaustion?

Hannah explains what psychiatrist Frantz Fanon's work teaches us about the challenges and contradictions of striving to make people “well” in a sick society. Plus, she tells us why the Black Panther phrase “survival pending revolution” is a crucial reminder that while small-scale acts of care remain essential, only wholesale reform can ensure a better, less burnout, world for all.

Guest: Hannah Proctor
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

Recommended by Hannah

“Hyper” – A. Ismaïl

From The Sociological Review

The Stigma Conversations: Apocalypse and Change – I. Tyler, A. Knox
Uncommon Sense: Care – B. Skeggs, R. Hancock, A. H. Truong
Healing, knowing, enduring: Care and politics in damaged worlds – M. Tironi, I. Rodríguez-Giralt

By Hannah Proctor

Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat
“Sadistic, grinning rifle-women” in Gender, Emotions and Power, 1750–2020
university profile and website

Further reading

“Burn-out: The High Cost of High Achievement” – H. J. Freudenberger, G. Richelson
“Staff Burn‐Out” – H. J. Freudenberger
“How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation” – A. H. Petersen
“Edifice Complex” – B. Ansfield
“The making of burnout” – M. J. Hoffarth
“Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties” – M. Davis, J. Wiener
“The New Spirit of Capitalism” – L. Boltanski, E. Chiapello
“The Care Manifesto” – The Care Collective
“Revolutionary Suicide” – H. P. Newton
“The Case of Blackness” – F. Moten
“The Wretched of the Earth” – F. Fanon
“Disalienation” – C. Robcis

Read about Isabelle Le Pain’s work and watch Adam Curtis's films.

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Uncommon Sense is a project of the Sociological Review Foundation, a charity whose mission is to promote sociological thinking to audiences beyond academia.

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What does privilege look like today? How do the advantaged perform “ease”? And why do some of us feel at home in elite spaces, while others feel awkward? Princeton sociologist Shamus Khan joins Uncommon Sense to reflect on elites, entitlement and more. Reminding us that “poor people are not why there’s inequality; rich people are why there’s inequality”, he highlights the importance of studying elites for studying inequality, as the gap between the two grows.

Being the author of Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St Paul’s School (2011), Shamus tells Rosie and Alexis about how the way elites justify and see their position has shifted – and how a disability studies perspective helps us to cast a critical eye on the “ease” with which the few seem to nimbly navigate elite institutions. What seems like some of us “have it” and others “just don’t” is, suggests Shamus, socially produced – and what appears to be a “flat” and open world, ripe for the bold to seize, is really far more complex.

Plus: why might people who share the same knowledge be valued differently when that knowledge is held in different – racialised, minoritised – bodies? Also: why TV shows and movies about elites don’t stop at Saltburn, Succession and The Kardashians?

Guest: Shamus Khan
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense

Episode ResourcesFrom The Sociological Review

Spatial Delight: Space Invaders – N. Puwar, A. Lisiak
Uncommon Sense: Taste – I. Karademir Hazir, R. Hancock, A. H. Truong
‘Talent-spotting’ or ‘social magic’? Inequality, cultural sorting and constructions of the ideal graduate in elite professions – N. Ingram, K. Allen

By Shamus Khan

Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School
Saying Meritocracy and Doing Privilege (co-authored with Colin Jerolmack)
How Cultural Capital Emerged in Gilded Age America (co-authored with Fabien Accominotti, Adam Storer)

Further reading

“Flexible Citizenship” – A. Ong
“Space Invaders” – N. Puwar
“Learning to Labour” – P. Willis
“Understanding audience segmentation” – R. Peterson
“Reality Television and Class” – B. Skeggs, H. Wood
“‘Oh goodness, I am watching reality TV’: How methods make class in audience research” – B. Skeggs, N. Thumim, H. Wood
“Capital in the 21st Century” – T. Piketty

Read more about Shey O’Brien, Fabien Acconomoti, Pierre Bourdieu and Frantz Fanon.

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What are rules for? What's at stake if we assume that they're neutral? And if we want rules to be progressive, does it matter who makes them? Socio-legal scholar Swethaa Ballakrishnen joins Uncommon Sense to reflect on this and more, highlighting the value of studying law not just in theory but in action, and drawing on a career spanning law and academia in India and the USA.

As the author of "Accidental Feminism", which explores unintended parity in the Indian legal profession, Swethaa talks to Rosie and Alexis about intention and whether it is always needed for positive outcomes. We also ask: in a society characterised as “post-truth”, does anyone even care about rules anymore? Plus, Swethaa dissects the trope of “neutrality” – firmly embedded in legal discourse, from the idea of “blind justice” to the notion of equality before the law. There are dangers, they explain, to assuming that law is neutral, particularly given that it is often those in power who get to make and extend the rules – something critical race scholars have long been aware of.

Swethaa also fills us in on their recent interest in the TV show "Ted Lasso" and considers pop culture that speaks to our theme, including the series "Made in Heaven" and "Extraordinary Attorney Woo", plus a short film by Arun Falara.

Guest: Swethaa Ballakrishnen
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense at The Sociological Review.

Episode Resources

From The Sociological Review

Socio-legal Implications for Digital Environmental Activism – Audrey Verma et al.
The Moral Rhetoric of a Civilized Society – Susanna Menis
Depoliticisation, hybridisation and dual processes of stigmatisation – Shaoying Zhang

By Swethaa Ballakrishnen

Accidental Feminism
Law School as Straight Space
Gender Regimes and the Politics of Privacy (co-authored with Kalpana Kannabiran)
“At Odds with Everything Around Me” in Out of Place (forthcoming)
“Of Queerness, Rights, and Utopic Possibilities” (interview) – part of Queering the (Court)Room

Further reading

“The Cultural Politics of Emotion” – Sara Ahmed
“Gender Trouble” – Judith Butler
“Liquid Fear” – Zygmunt Bauman
“Female Fear Factory” – Pumla Dineo Gqola
“Native Nostalgia” – Jacob Dlamini

Read more about Sigmund Freud, and the work of Johnny Steinberg.

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“If you’re talented and work hard, success (whatever that is) will be yours!” – So says the powerful system and ideology known as “meritocracy”. But if only it were so simple! Jo Littler joins Uncommon Sense to reflect on where this idea came from, how it became mainstream, and how it gets used by elites to convince us we live in a system that is open and fair when the reality is anything but that.

But Jo also shows things are changing. Since the crash of 2008 it’s been clear we’re living and working on a far from “level” playing field. Jo describes the recent embrace of non-work and the rise of assertive “left feminisms” as a sign of hope that the tide may be turning against meritocracy and shallow ideas of success, and discusses the work of people leading the way.

Plus: we reflect on the trope of escape. Why is it so often that to “succeed” in life, one must leave the place that they’re from and embrace the risky and new? And what’s up with the cliche of the “ladder” as a visual image for success? Jo reflects with reference to everyone from Ayn Rand to Raymond Williams. Also: we consider the 1990s rise of the “Mumpreneur” and the more recent phenomenon of the “Cleanfluencer”.

Guest: Jo Littler
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense at The Sociological Review.

Episode Resources

Jo, Alexis and Rosie recommend

C. Carraway’s book “Skint Estate”
M. Brown and R. Jones’ book “Paint Your Town Red”
D. Aronofsky’s film “Requiem for a Dream”
R. Linklater’s film “Slacker”

From The Sociological Review

Sociological reflections on ‘doing’ aspiration within the psychic landscape of class – Kim Allen
Birds of a Feather – Natalie Wreyford
The price of the ticket revised – Anthony Miro Born

By Jo Littler

Against Meritocracy
Mrs Hinch, the rise of the cleanfluencer and the neoliberal refashioning of housework (co-authored with Emma Casey)
Left Feminisms: Conversations on the Personal and Political

Further reading

“The Rise of the Meritocracy” – Michael Young
“The Coming of Post-industrial Society” – Daniel Bell
“Coloniality and Meritocracy in Unequal EU Migrations” – Simone Varriale
“Perceptions of Meritocracy in Singapore” – Terri-Anne Teo
“Meritocracy and Elitism in a Global City” – Kenneth Paul Tan
“The Tyranny of Merit” – Michael Sandel
“Inequality by Design” – Claude Fischer, et al.
“Notes on the Perfect”– Angela McRobbie
“Culture and Society” – Raymond Williams

Read more about the industrial sociologist Alan Fox, the work of Bev Skeggs on respectability politics, the work of Nancy Fraser, and the Billionaire Britain 2022 report by The Equality Trust.

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What is public sociology and why does it matter more than ever? Gary Younge, Chantelle Lewis and Cecilia Menjívar join Michaela Benson to reflect on its meaning, value and stakes.

In a time of perpetual crisis and gross inequality, how can sociologists best change minds and set agendas? Why are some voices valued over others? And who does being truly “public” involve more than simply being high profile?

Gary Younge reflects on what sociologists and journalists can teach each other – and the ongoing struggle in the UK for space in which work on race can be truly incubated and explored. Cecilia Menjívar describes her deep engagement with migration and gender-based violence – and how in Latin America, “public sociology” is simply “sociology”. And Chantelle Lewis describes the lack of value applied to black scholarship in UK academia – and urges us to embrace hope, honesty and solidarity.

An essential listening! Discussing thinkers ranging from E.H. Carr on history to Maria Marcela Lagarde on feminicide, plus Stuart Hall, Hazel Carby, bell hooks, Sheila Rowbotham and many more.

Guests: Gary Younge, Chantelle Lewis, Cecilia Menjívar
Host: Michaela Benson
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense at The Sociological Review.

Episode Resources

From The Sociological Review

Strategies of public intellectual engagement – Mohamed Amine Brahimi, et al.
An interventionist sociologist: Stuart Hall, public engagement and racism – Karim Murji
Curating Sociology – Nirmal Puwar, Sanjay Sharma

By our guests

Gary’s books Dispatches from the Diaspora & Another Day in the Death of America
Chantelle’s co-produced podcast Surviving Society
Cecilia’s work on migration and gender-based violence

Further reading

“Gary Younge: how racism shaped my critical eye” – Gary Younge
“Women's Liberation & the New Politics” – Sheila Rowbotham
“For Public Sociology” – Michael Burawoy
“What is History?” – E.H. Carr
“Beyond the blade” – investigation by The Guardian

Read more about the work of Hazel Carby, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall and bell hooks, the life and work of Marcela Lagarde and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the work of Jane Addams on public housing, as well as the poet, essayist and activist June Jordan.

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From Shakespeare to RuPaul, we all love a performance. But what exactly is it? What are its boundaries, its powers, its potential, its stakes? Kareem Khubchandani, who also performs as LaWhore Vagistan – “everyone's favourite desi drag queen aunty” – joins Uncommon Sense to unpack the latest thinking on refusal, repetition and more. And to discuss “Ishtyle”, Kareem’s ethnography of gay Indian nightlife in Chicago and Bangalore, which attends to desire and fun in the lives of global Indian workers too often stereotyped as cogs in the wheels of globalisation.

Kareem also reflects on the particular value of queer nightlife, and celebrates how drag kings skilfully unmask what might be the ultimate performance: heteromasculinity. We also ask: what do thinkers like Bourdieu and Foucault reveal about performance? Why is there still a way to go in our understanding of drag and how might decolonising it serve us all? Plus: why calling something “performative” is actually not about calling things “fake”? In fact, performance can make things “real”…

With reflection on Judith Butler, “Paris is Burning”, “RuPaul's Drag Race” and clubbing in Sydney and Tokyo.

Guest: Kareem Khubchandani
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense at The Sociological Review.

Episode Resources
From The Sociological Review

Advantages of upper-class backgrounds: Forms of capital, school cultures and educational performance – Vegard Jarness, Thea Bertnes Strømme
‘You've Gotta Learn how to Play the Game’: Homeless Women's Use of Gender Performance as a Tool for Preventing Victimization – Laura Huey, Eric Berndt
Performing the Disabled Body in Academia – Luke Walker

By Kareem Khubchandani

Ishtyle
Decolonize Drag
Queer Nightlife (co-edited with Kemi Adeyemi and Ramón Rivera-Servera)
Dance Floor Divas
Kareem’s website, including more about LaWhore Vagistan

Further reading

“Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save” – Tyson Yunkaporta
“Toward equality: Including non-human animals in studies of lived religion and nonreligion” – Lori G. Beaman, Lauren Strumos
“A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet” – Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore
“The Chicken Chronicles: A Memoir” – Alice Walker
“The Chicken Book” – Page Smith, Charles Daniel

Read more about the work of Zoe Todd, Adam Searle, Anna Tsing, Anna Guasco, Paige Colton and The Care Collective.

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Does anyone know what European means? Manuela Boatcă thought she did, until a late 1990s move from Romania to Germany unsettled everything she had taken for granted. In this episode, she challenges mainstream ideas of “Europe” to show how its borders extend to the Caribbean (and beyond) – a fact that’s obvious if we acknowledge colonialism’s past and present, but is an inconvenient truth for some in political power.

Alexis and Rosie ask Manuela: How has Brexit revealed the contradictions built into so much discourse about “Europe”? How does “Creolizing” theory differ from “Decolonising” it? And what is the legacy of early sociologist Max Weber’s leading question: why the West?

Plus: a celebration of Immanuel Wallerstein’s World Systems approach, which decentres the nation state. With reflection on Stuart Hall, Edouard Glissant, Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih.

Guest: Manuela Boatcă
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense at The Sociological Review.

Episode ResourcesManuela, Rosie, Alexis and our producer Alice recommended

Arton Capital’s The Passport Index
“Europe” travel guides
Antoni Gaudi’s Sagrada Família
Daša Drndić’s novel “Canzone Di Guerra”

From The Sociological Review

The material effects of Whiteness – Aleksandra Lewicki
Puzzlement of a déjà vu – Nirmal Puwar
The ambiguous lives of ‘the other whites’ – Dominika Blachnika-Ciacek, Irma Budinaite-Mackine

By Manuela Boatcă

Thinking Europe Otherwise
(Dis)United Kingdom
Counter-Mapping as Method
What does British citizenship have to do with Global Social Inequalities?

Further reading

“Provincializing Europe” – Dipesh Chakrabarty
“Poetics of relation” – Édouard Glissant
“The Creolization of Theory” – Shu-mei Shih, Françoise Lionnet
“Sweetness And Power” – Sidney Mintz
“The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” – Max Weber
“The Essential Wallerstein” – Immanuel Wallerstein

Read more about the work of Stuart Hall, Fernand Braudel, Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, Fernando Coronil and Salman Sayyid.

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AUDIO CONTENT WARNING: description of extreme racist violence

In 1993, Black British teenager Stephen Lawrence was murdered in a racist attack that sparked a long fight for justice and led the UK to ask questions of itself and its institutions. Three decades on – with The Runnymede Trust’s Shabna Begum, and Suresh Grover of The Monitoring Group – Karis Campion of the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre hosts this special episode to ask: who are we now? What happened to anti-racist solidarity and how can it progress?

Karis and guests reflect on the fragmentation of “political blackness”, “monitoring” as a radical act inspired by The Black Panther Party, and the importance of showing systemic racism while doing justice to individual lives. Plus: what does social media offer to anti-racism when the internet provides fertile ground for prejudice? And what are the costs of fighting for change in an unjust world?

With reference to the activist writer Ambalavaner Sivanandan, the feminist scholar Audre Lorde, the social geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and more. A collaboration between the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre and The Sociological Review.

Guests: Suresh Grover, Shabna Begum
Host: Karis Campion
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense at The Sociological Review.

Episode ResourcesFrom Karis, Shabna and Suresh

Karis’ work at The Stephen Lawrence Research Centre
Shabna’s book “From Sylhet to Spitalfields”
Suresh in conversation with Paul Gilroy

Further reading

“Abolition Geography” – Ruth Wilson Gilmore
“Another Day in the Death of America” – Gary Younge
“Here to Stay, Here to Fight” – Paul Field, et al. (eds)
“I Write What I Like” – Steve Biko
“Policing the Crisis” – Stuart Hall, et al.
“Race and Resistance” – Ambalavaner Sivanandan
“The Uses of Anger” – Audre Lorde

Online resources

Over-policed and under-protected: the road to Safer Schools – The Runnymede Trust
The Baroness Casey Review (this episode was recorded prior to this publication)
The Black Panther Party – US National Archives
The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry – Sir William Macpherson

Find out more about Quddus Ali and the cases of Michael Menson, Ricky Reel, Rolan Adams and Rohit Duggal, as well as the activist Claudia Jones.

And check out The Monitoring Group and The Runnymede Trust, as well as The Stephen Lawrence Centre Archive.

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What does Eurovision have to do with the Coronation? In this episode swap, the team at Who do we think we are? is talking about what we learn about “Global Britain” and its imagined community by looking at how migrants understand major cultural events.

Elena Zambelli explains what social scientists mean when they talk about the imagined community. Laura Clancy, sociologist of the royal family, joins us to talk about the missing voices in conversations about the future of the British monarchy. Co-hosts Nando Sigona and Michaela Benson reflect on what British citizens living abroad, EU citizens and others who have made the UK their homes told them about how they understand Britain and their place within it following Brexit. What does hearing from them about the monarchy, the Commonwealth Games and Eurovision make visible about the new borders of political membership and symbolic boundaries of belonging?

In this episode we cover:

The imagined community
The monarchy and the myth of the British nation
Eurovision, the Commonwealth Games and Royal Events

Active listening questions:

What imagined community, or imagined communities, do you feel that you belong to?
Are there public events during which you do or could celebrate your belonging to this or these communities? Which ones?
Who do you think is excluded from this imagined community and how? And what does this tell us about the symbolic boundaries of this community?

Find more about:

What EU citizens in the UK and British citizens in the EU think about the monarchy in Elena and Catherine’s article in The Sociological Review Magazine
The concept of imagined community in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and the critique offered by Partha Chatterjee’s The Nation and its Fragments
Laura’s sociology of the royal family in her book Running the family firm and the Surviving Society podcast miniseries The Global Power of the British Monarchy

Our podcast picks for this episode are:

Academic Aunties on “Harry and Meghan”
The Allusionist on Eurovision
Conversations with IRiS on Political Demography

Follow Who do we think we are? on all major podcasting platforms or through their RSS Feed, and follow the podcast on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.

Get all the latest updates from the MIGZEN research project on Twitter and Instagram.

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“Follow”? “Block”? “Accept”? Anthropologist Ilana Gershon joins us to reflect on breakups in both our intimate and working lives. She tells Alexis and Rosie how hearing her students’ surprising stories of using new media – supposedly a tool for connection – to end romantic entanglements led to her 2010 book “The Breakup 2.0”. She also shares insights from studying hiring in corporate America and describes how, in the febrile “new economy”, the very nature of networking and how we understand our careers have been transformed.

Ilana also celebrates Marilyn Strathern’s influential article “Cutting the Network” for challenging our assumptions about endless and easy connection. She responds to the work of sociologists Richard Sennett and Mark Granovetter, and highlights Teri Silvio’s theory of “animation” as a fruitful way of thinking about our online selves.

Plus: Rosie, Alexis and Ilana share their pop culture picks on this month’s theme, from the hit TV show “Severance” to the phenomenon of “shitposting” on Linkedin.

Guest: Ilana Gershon
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense at The Sociological Review.

Episode ResourcesIlana, Rosie, Alexis and our producer Alice recommended

Dan Erickson’s TV series “Severance”
“shitposting” on Linkedin, as discussed by Bethan Kapur for VICE
The Quebec reality TV show “Occupation Double”
Halle Butler’s novel “The New Me”

From The Sociological Review

“A Sociological Playlist” – Meg-John Barker and Justin Hancock
“The Sociology of Love” – Julia Carter
“Becoming Ourselves Online: Disabled Transgender Existence In/Through Digital Social Life” – Christian J. Harrison
“The Politics of Digital Peace, Play, and Privacy during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Between Digital Engagement, Enclaves, and Entitlement” – Francesca Sobande
From Uncommon Sense: “Intimacy, with Katherine Twamley”

By Ilana Gershon

“The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media”
“The Breakup 2.1: The ten-year update”
“Un-Friend My Heart: Facebook, Promiscuity, and Heartbreak in a Neoliberal Age”
“Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today”
“Neoliberal Agency”

Further reading

“Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan” – Teri Silvio
“Forms of Talk” – Erving Goffman
“The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism” – Richard Sennett
“The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain” – Francesca Sobande
“The Strength of Weak Ties” – Mark S. Granovetter
“Cutting the Network” – Marilyn Strathern

And have a look at the basics of Actor–Network Theory.

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What makes “good” taste? Who decides? And what’s it got to do with inequality? Sociologist Irmak Karademir Hazir grew up watching women in her parents’ clothing boutique. She explains how her fascination for taste emerged from that and why talking about things like fashion, film and music is far from trivial – it’s how we distinguish ourselves from others; how we’re recognised, or dismissed.

Irmak tells Rosie and Alexis how sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu have theorised “distinction”, showing how “highbrow” taste is decided by those with money and other kinds of capital. They also discuss the idea of the “cultural omnivore” and ask: Is what looks like broad consumption – of everything from opera to grime – just elitism in disguise?

Plus: Why are Marvel blockbusters Irmak’s “guilty pleasure”? Why is “symbolic violence” as scary as it sounds? And do we have a moral duty to be honest about our tastes?

Guest: Irmak Karademir Hazir
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense at The Sociological Review.

Production Note: This episode was recorded shortly before the devastating earthquake in southern and central Turkey and northern and western Syria.

Episode Resources

Irmak, Rosie, Alexis and our producer Alice recommended

The movies of the “Marvel Cinematic Universe”
John Waters’ film “Hairspray”
Agnès Jaoui’s film “Le Goût des autres” (The Taste of Others)
The BBC documentary series “Signs of the Times”

From The Sociological Review

“Feminism After Bourdieu” – Lisa Adkins and Bev Skeggs [special issue editors]
“Aesthetic labour, class and taste: Mobility aspirations of middle-class women working in luxury-retail” – Bryan Boyle and Kobe De Keere
“Taste the Joy: Food, Family, Women and Social Media” – Smriti Singh

By Irmak Karademir Hazir

“Cultural Omnivorousness”
“How (not) to feed young children: A class-cultural analysis of food parenting practices”
“Do Omnivores Perform Class Distinction? A Qualitative Inspection of Culinary Tastes, Boundaries and Cultural Tolerance” (co-author: Nihal Simay Yalvaç)
“Exploring patterns of children’s cultural participation: parental cultural capitals and their transmission” (co-authors: Adrian Leguina and Francisco Azpitarte)

Further readings

“Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider” – Satnam Virdee
“Return of a Native: Learning from the Land” – Vron Ware
“Natives: Race & Class in the Ruins of Empire” – Akala
“Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control” – Bridget Anderson
“Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism” – Kwame Nkrumah
“Decolonization is not a metaphor” – Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang
“Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples” – Linda Tuhiwai Smith
Frederick Cooper’s work on how people fought against subordination in the French empire
Gurminder Bhambra’s work on Decolonizing Whiteness

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Emojis! Feminism! Rage! Sociologist Billy Holzberg joins us to talk about emotion. Why is it dismissed as an obstacle to progress and clear thinking – and to whose benefit? How can we let anger into politics without sanctioning far-right violence? And why are some of us freer than others to play with emotional abjection? Billy reflects on all this and more with Alexis and Rosie, celebrating thinkers from Sara Ahmed to Karl Marx, W.E.B. Du Bois to Yasmin Gunaratnam.

Billy also reflects on queerness, childhood and shame; the emotional precarity of TV’s Fleabag; the playfulness of emojis; and the desperate but subversive power of the hunger striker. Plus: a welcome clarification of the slippery line between affect and emotion.

Guest: Billy Holzberg
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense at The Sociological Review.

Episode Resources

Billy, Rosie, Alexis and our producer Alice recommended

Jim Hubbard’s documentary “United in Anger: A history of ACT UP”
The idea of thinking sociologically with Emojis
Robert Munsch and Sheila McGraw’s children’s book “Love You Forever”
Lesley Jamison’s essay collection “The Empathy Exams”

From The Sociological Review

“Everyone shows emotions everywhere but class photos” – Laura Harris
“‘Serenity Now!’ Emotion management and solidarity in the workplace” – Jordan McKenzie, et al.
“Diane Abbott, misogynoir and the politics of Black British feminism’s anticolonial imperatives: ‘In Britain too, it’s as if we don’t exist’” – Lisa Amanda Palmer

By Billy Holzberg

“The Multiple Lives of Affect: A Case Study of Commercial Surrogacy”
“‘Wir schaffen das’: Hope and hospitality beyond the humanitarian border”
“The affective life of heterosexuality: heteropessimism and postfeminism in Fleabag” (co-author: Aura Lehtonen)

Further readings

“The Cultural Politics of Emotion” – Sara Ahmed
“Death and the Migrant: Bodies, Borders and Care” – Yasmin Gunaratnam
“Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” – Karl Marx
“Postcolonial Melancholia” – Paul Gilroy
“The Souls of Black Folk” – W.E.B. Du Bois
The work of psychologist Paul Ekman
“The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” – Audre Lorde
“The Politics of Compassion: Immigration and Asylum Policy” – Ala Sirriyeh
“Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy” – Carolyn Pedwell
“The Spiritualization of Politics and the Technologies of Resistant Body: Conceptualizing Hunger Striking Subjectivity” – Ashjan Ajour
“On Heteropessimism” – Asa Seresin

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Lonely? Mean? Hostile? Cities get a bad rap. But why? Romit Chowdhury has lived in cities worldwide; from Kolkata to Rotterdam. He tells Alexis and Rosie about the wonder of urban “enchantment” found in a stranger’s smile, our changing ideas of the “urban”, and why anonymity is not always in fact the enemy of civility and friendship in the city.

Plus: how did “walking the city” emerge as a revolutionary research method? And why is Romit so fascinated with public transport – from exploring auto-rickshaw drivers’ masculinity in Kolkata, to studying sexual violence on the busy trains of Tokyo.

Romit, Alexis and Rosie also share their tips for thinking differently about urban life – from Japanese film to novels that explode norms about bodies in the city.

Guest: Romit Chowdhury
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense at The Sociological Review.

Episode ResourcesCharlotte, Rosie, Alexis and our producer Alice recommended

Claudia Piñeiro’s novel “Elena Knows”
N. K. Jemisin’s book “The City We Became”
Shinya Tsukamoto’s filmography
Teju Cole’s novel “Every Day is For the Thief”

From The Sociological Review

“Karachi” – Shama Dossa
“Whose City Now?” – Ray Forrest
“Trash Talk: Unpicking the deadlock around urban waste and regeneration” – Francisco Calafate-Faria
“Rising with the Rooster: How urban chickens are relaxing the pace of life” – Catherine Oliver

By Romit Chowdhury

“Sexual assault on public transport: Crowds, nation, and violence in the urban commons”
“The social life of transport infrastructures: Masculinities and everyday mobilities in Kolkata”
“Density as urban affect: The enchantment of Tokyo’s crowds”

Further readings

“Dangerous Liaisons – Women and Men: Risk and Reputation in Mumbai” – Shilpa Phadke
“For Space” – Doreen Massey
“The Metropolis and Mental Life” – Georg Simmel
“The Arcades Project” – Walter Benjamin
“Delhi Crime” (TV series) – Richie Mehta
“The Country and the City” – Raymond Williams
“Why Women of Colour in Geography?” – Audrey Kobayashi
“‘Delhi is a hopeful place for me!’: young middle-class women reclaiming the Indian city” – Syeda Jenifa Zahan
“The Way They Blow the Horn: Caribbean Dollar Cabs and Subaltern Mobilities” – Asha Best
“Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City” – Brandi Thompson Summers
And the work of Ayona Datta, Linda McDowell, Patricia Noxolo, Linda Peake, Tracey Skelton, Andrea Roberts and Gill Valentine

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We each have a body, but every body’s story is unique. In this intimate conversation, sociologist Charlotte Bates tells Alexis and Rosie why studying bodies – and how we talk about them – matters in a society where some are privileged over others, and why ableism harms us all.

Charlotte talks about her co-authored work on wild swimming, arguing that despite its commodification, it holds subversive power. She also considers how the unwell body collides with the demands of capitalist life – revealing just how absurd it can be. Plus: what “wellness” fails to capture – and why health is not a lifestyle choice.

Guest: Charlotte Bates
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense at The Sociological Review.

Episode Resources

Charlotte, Rosie, Alexis and our producer Alice recommended

Nina Mingya Powles’ book “Small Bodies of Water”
Andy Jackson’s poem “The Change Room”
Viktoria Modesta’s song “Prototype”
Mark O’Connell’s book “To Be A Machine”

From The Sociological Review

“Making Visible: Chronic Illness and the Academy” – Anna Ruddock
“Race and Disability in the Academy” – Moya Bailey
“Embodying Sociology” [Supplement Issue]

By Charlotte Bates

“Vital Bodies: Living with Illness”
“Conviviality, disability and design in the city”
Research on wild swimming with Kate Moles – including this article and this forthcoming publication.

Further readings

“Beyond the Periphery of the Skin” – Silvia Federici
“Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s” – Donna Haraway
“Moving Beyond Pain” – bell hooks
“On Being Ill” – Virginia Woolf
“Believing Your Pain as Radical Self-Care” – Jameisha Prescod (in this publication)
“Wellness Culture is Ableism in Sheep’s Clothing” – Lucy Pasha-Robinson
The Polluted Leisure Project – Clifton Evers and James Davoll
The Moving Oceans project
“Illness: The Cry of the Flesh” – Havi Carel
Alexandre Baril’s scholarly work
“Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure” – Samantha Walton
“Why climate justice is impossible without racial justice” – Georgia Whitaker
On maternal mortality – Divya Talwar

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EDUCATORS! STUDENTS! LISTENERS! We want to hear from you ...

We’re taking a short summer break, and will be back in September ready and refreshed for the new term, and with a new episode for you!

So, while Rosie and Alexis have some well-earned time-outs – and catch up on reading for forthcoming shows on things like cities, emotion and noise – we have a request: Could you use just a few of those spare 45 minutes this month to share some of your thoughts with us? To be precise, we'd like to know how we can help you ...

If you're an educator – at whatever level – we'd like to know, do you use podcasts in your teaching? If so, how? And which ones? Maybe you've even asked your students to make their own? And if you don't use them, then why not? What gets in the way of that? And how could Uncommon Sense do more to help you to promote and explain the sociological imagination?
And if you're a student or a researcher, we want to know what Uncommon Sense has done for you so far? Has it made you think about how you explain your work to non-academic friends? Maybe even that most challenging of audiences, your parents!?
And if you're neither of the above, you're still very much part of the Uncommon Sense community! We want to know what keeps you listening? And whether we've prompted you to "see the world afresh through the eyes of sociologists"? That's what we promise at the top of pretty much every episode ...

Share your thoughts with us by email, by Instagram, and on Twitter. You can also read all about using podcasts in the classroom from The Sociological Review's podcast lead Professor Michaela Benson.

And recommend us to friends, family and more. It's easy to subscribe – look us up in whatever app you use and tap "follow"!

We'll be back in September – See you soon!

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Too often, talk about security seems to belong to politicians and psychologists; to discussions about terrorism and defence, individual anxiety and insecurity. But how do sociologists think about it? And why care?

Daria Krivonos – who works on migration, race and class in Central and Eastern Europe – tells Alexis and Rosie why security matters. What’s the impact of calling migration a “security threat”? How does the security of the privileged rely on the insecurity of the precarious? And, as Russia’s war in Ukraine continues, what would it mean to truly #StandwithUkraine – from ensuring better job security for its workers abroad, to cancelling its debt?

Plus: pop culture pointers; from Kae Tempest’s “People’s Faces” to the movie “The Mauritanian” – and Alexis’ teenage passion for Rage Against the Machine.

Guest: Daria Krivonos
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense at The Sociological Review.

Episode Resources

Daria, Rosie and Alexis recommended

Kae Tempest’s song “People’s Faces”
Rage Against the Machine’s song “Without a Face”
Kevin Macdonald’s movie “The Mauritanian”

From The Sociological Review

“Brexit On ‘Plague Island’: Fortifying The UK’s Borders In Times Of Crisis” – Michaela Benson and Nando Sigona
“Organised State Abandonment: The meaning of Grenfell” – Brenna Bhandar
“Food Insecurity: Upsetting ‘Apple Carts’ in Abstract and Tangible Markets” – Susan Marie Martin

By Daria Krivonos

“The making of gendered ‘migrant workers’ in youth activation: The case of young Russian-speakers in Finland”
“Ukrainian farm workers and Finland’s regular army of labour”
“Who stands with Ukraine in the long term?”
“Racial capitalism and the production of difference in Helsinki and Warsaw” (forthcoming)

Further readings

“The Death of Asylum” – Alison Mountz
“What was the so-called ‘European Refugee Crisis’?” – Danish Refugee Council
World Food Programme Yemen and Ethiopia statistics
“In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All” – UN Secretary-General
“Ukrainian Workers Flee ‘Modern Slavery’ Conditions on UK Farms” – Diane Taylor
“Bordering” – Nira Yuval-Davis, Georgie Wemyss and Kathryn Cassidy
Anthony Giddens’ sociological work; including “Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age”

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Think of intimacy and, pretty soon, you’ll probably think about sex. But, as sociologist Katherine Twamley explains, intimacy means much more than that: it’s woven through so many of our relationships – including with people whose names we might not even know. She tells Rosie and Alexis how an accidental trip to India got her thinking about the varied meanings of “love” across cultures and contexts, and reflects on whether, to quote the famous song, love and marriage really do “go together like a horse and carriage”.

Plus: what could it mean to decolonise love? Why should we be wary of acts performed in the name of love? Will we ever live in a truly “contactless” world, and who wants that? And we get intimate with the artist Sophie Calle.

Guest: Katherine Twamley Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong Executive Producer: Alice Bloch Sound Engineer: David Crackles Music: Joe Gardner Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense at The Sociological Review.

Episode Resources

Katherine, Rosie, Alexis and our producer Alice recommended

Ian McEwan’s novel “Machines Like Me”
Haruhiko Kawaguchi’s photography
Sophie Calle’s conceptual art
Alex Thompson’s film “Saint Frances”

From The Sociological Review

“The Sociology of Love” – Julia Carter
On asexual people and intimacy – Matt Dawson, Liz McDonnell and Susie Scott
On the phenomenon of self-marriage – Kinneret Lahad and Michal Karvel-Tovi

Further readings

“Love, Marriage and Intimacy Among Gujarati Indians” – Katherine Twamley
“Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship” – Kath Weston
“Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care” – Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas (editors)
On Emotional Labour – Arlie Hochschild
“Decolonising Families and Relationships” – British Sociological Association webinars
“Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds” – Zygmunt Bauman
“Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences” – Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim and Ulrich Beck
Nandita Dutta’s research on South Asian beauty salons in London as diasporic sites of intimacy
Nick Crossley’s sociological work
Jessica Ringrose’s sociological work
Greta Thunberg’s Twitter page (mentioned by Katherine as an intimacy example)
James Baldwin’s novel “Giovanni’s Room”
Sally Rooney’s novel “Normal People”

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School should be about play, fulfilment and learning. But it is also a place of surveillance, discipline and discrimination. Activist scholar Remi Joseph-Salisbury has researched policing, racism and education in the UK. He tells Rosie and Alexis what happens when policing enters the classroom, its impact on students and teachers of colour, and the need for wholesale reform – including a truly anti-racist curriculum.

Plus: how can we break the “school-to-prison” pipeline? What is Critical Race Theory and why has it prompted a backlash? What does it mean to really receive “an education”? And what’s the harm in the trope of the “inspirational super teacher”, as found in films from Sister Act to Dead Poets Society?

This episode was recorded prior to news being made public of the experience of the pupil known as “Child Q”, reported in mid-March 2022. Remi has since written about this.

Guest: Remi Joseph-Salisbury
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong

Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense at The Sociological Review.

Episode Resources

Remi, Rosie and Alexis recommended

John Agard's poem “Checking Out Me History”
Steve McQueen's TV drama “Small Axe: Education”
Laurie Nunn's TV series “Sex Education”
Jesse Thistle's memoir “From the Ashes: My Story of Being Métis, Homeless, and Finding My Way”

From The Sociological Review

On “Prevent”, a counter-extremism policy at UK universities Niyousha Bastani
“Social Mixing in Urban Schools” Sumi Hollingworth
“School-to-Prison Pipeline” Karen Graham

By Remi Joseph-Salisbury

“Race and Racism in English Secondary Schools”
“Afro Hair: How Pupils Are Tackling Discriminatory Uniform Policies”
On the demonisation of Critical Race Theory

Further reading

“Racism and Education: Coincidence or Conspiracy?” David Gillborn
“Race, Gender and Educational Desire: Why Black Women Succeed and Fail” Heidi Mirza
“Lammy Review” MP David Lammy
“How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System” Bernard Coard
The Halo Collective for a future without hair discrimination
No More Exclusions for racial justice in education

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Home means something to everyone. More than just bricks and mortar, it’s about security and belonging, citizenship and exclusion. Michaela Benson has researched it all: from the UK’s self-build communities, to people seeking a new lifestyle abroad. She tells Alexis and Rosie about this and her own experience of home, including her mother’s relationship to her place of birth: Hong Kong.

Plus, Kwame Lowe and Alice Grahame introduce us to the Rural Urban Synthesis Society in London. What does it take to build your own “Grand Design” and why would anyone want to do that? What happens when areas become known as “problem places” and what’s gentrification got to do with it? And who is to blame for the housing crisis?

Guests: Michaela Benson, Kwame Lowe, Alice Grahame
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong

Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker
Special thanks to: Kirsteen Paton, Lisa Dikomitis, RUSS

Uncommon Sense sees our world afresh, through the eyes of sociologists. Brought to you by The Sociological Review, it’s a space for questioning taken-for-granted ideas about society – for imagining better ways of living together and confronting our shared crises. Hosted by Rosie Hancock in Sydney and Alexis Hieu Truong in Ottawa, featuring a different guest each month, Uncommon Sense insists that sociology is for everyone.

Episode Resources

Michaela, Rosie and Alexis recommend:

“Fragile Monsters” (2021) by Catherine Menon
“Unsheltered” (2018) by Barbara Kingsolver
“Foundation” (1942) by Isaac Asimov

From The Sociological Review:

“Unhomely Homes: A visual study of Airbnb” (2020) by Kenneth Kajoranta and Anna Pechurina
On older New Zealanders and the role of home for feeling secure in an uncertain world (1998) by Ann Dupuis and David Thorns
A critical review of the existing literature on “home” (2004) by Shelley Mallett

Uncommon Sense: Recent Episodes

The Sociological Review